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Naomi Shihab Nye Sponsored by JUST BUFFALO LITERARY CENTER NAOMI READER’S SHIHAB NYE GUIDE A Wandering Poet – Naomi Shihab Nye Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1952 to Aziz Shihab, a Palestinian refugee from Jerusalem, and Miriam Shihab, an American of German and Swiss descent, Nye lived in the Midwest with her parents and brother for 14 years. The family then moved to the West Bank to live outside Jerusalem before returning to the States to settle in San Antonio. Throughout her career, Nye has traveled extensively in Europe, Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, and the Middle East, teaching in schools and promoting international goodwill through education and creative expression. A “wandering poet,” Nye also calls herself a “vagabond with many influences. Women, men, children, animals, a nut.” She is a long-time admirer of the American poet and pacifist William Stafford, who shared her focus on the intimate, unexamined life, and she also cites writers such as Carl Sandberg, W. S. Merwin and Lucille Clifton as inspiration. Nye was raised on her father’s vivid stories about life back in the Middle East, and on classic poems and children’s tales her mother read to her, from Emily Dickinson to Aesop’s Fables and Little Women. She published her first poem in a children’s magazine when “Naomi Shihab Nye is an American, an Arab, a Poet, a she was seven and has kept a journal for years, basing parent, a woman of Texas, a woman of ideas.” many of her poems and stories on her own experiences. –Bill Moyers, journalist and public commentator She was especially close to her father, a former editor of the Jerusalem Times who later worked as a writer for the Naomi Shihab Nye finds artistic strength in a life spent San Antonio Express News, and his mother, “Sitti” Khadra straddling cultures and countries. A leading contemporary Shihab (“sitti” is Arabic for “grandmother”), whom Nye Palestinian-American writer, she is also regarded as one visited when her family lived in the West Bank. From of the most accomplished female poets of the American them she inherits a unique perspective into what she Southwest. For more than three decades, Nye has been believes is the “primary source” of poetry: “…local life, writing and editing poems, essays, novels and acclaimed random characters met on the streets, our own ancestry children’s books that focus on the everyday lives of sifting down to us through small essential daily tasks.” cultures around the world, from Jerusalem to the Latino neighborhoods in her hometown of San Antonio, Texas. Nye’s early free verse chapbooks, Tattooed Feet (1977) and Eye-to-Eye (1978), were followed by her Nye is known for her ability to use simple, spare language first full-length poetry collection,Different Ways to that celebrates and elevates ordinary events, people, places Pray (1980), in which she explores the similarities and and objects. Says Booklist, “Nye is a fluid poet, and her differences between Southwestern American cultures poems are also full of the urgency of spoken language. from the United States to Mexico. I Feel a Little Jumpy Her direct, unadorned vocabulary serves her well.” Her Around You (1996) pairs 194 “his and her” poems written hunger to explore people’s viewpoints is tempered by a by both a man and a woman, and The Space between Our humble examination of her personal and cultural biases, Footsteps (1998) is a collection of poems and full-color and she demands nothing less of her readers. paintings about the Middle East. 2 With the destruction of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, Nye invoked her heritage again by speaking out against terrorism and prejudice. Her concern over the lack of understanding between Westerners and Arabs led to her publication in 2002 of 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, a collection culled from years of writing and a timely finalist for the National Book Award. In the bestselling You and Yours (2005), Nye revisits the Middle East more intimately as a mother and a traveler. Her latest work includes the poetry collection, Transfer (2011), and a forthcoming collection of very short stories, There Is No Long Distance Now (2012). Transfer is a mixture of short free verse poems, longer narrative pieces and prose poems. Nye dedicates the St. Louis, Missouri book to her father’s story as a proud yet heartbroken Fuel (1998), Nye’s sixth and most acclaimed poetry Palestinian immigrant. Aziz, also a poet and writer, was a collection, is praised for its ability to span many topics, quick-witted, outgoing news reporter who was passionate cultures, time periods and experiences in places she’s lived about his homeland. In one section, Nye includes 11 of or visited, from Japan to Texas. A talented musician, she her father’s poems, “transferring” her book to him. Aziz writes and performs her own songs and has produced two Shihab’s words illustrate how devastated he was by his albums of music—one of which shares a title with Lullaby family’s forced exodus from Jerusalem following Israel’s Raft (1997), a children’s picture book. Nye has also rise to power, and how he lived the rest of his days in compiled and edited several anthologies, including the the United States with a refugee’s embittered hopes of award-winning This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from returning home. “I immigrated to the land of the free, Around the World (1992), The Tree Is Older Than You Are: but my people weren’t free,” he writes in his poem, “We A Bilingual Gathering of Poems & Stories from Mexico with did not have drinking water in the middle of the ocean.” Paintings by Mexican Artists (1995) and Is This Forever, or What?: Poems and Paintings from Texas (2004). Transfer also touches on the ethnic diversity of Nye’s San Antonio, and her experiences abroad in cities like “I never get tired of mixtures,” Nye has said. She borrows Jerusalem and Cairo, to create a collection that bears from Middle Eastern and Native American religions, and witness to a shared narrative—what she writes is a “large writes of her San Antonio work, “My poems and stories family of voices linking human experience. We have often begin with the voices of our neighbors, mostly no borders when we read.” According to the publisher, Mexican American, always inventive and surprising.” BOA Editions, “At the center of these poems is a looking inward, a questioning of things that help the traveler and Nye’s artistic sensitivity and cultural awareness especially of things that should help the traveler but for some reason shine in her well-regarded books for children and do not.” teens. Several are autobiographical and intentionally highlight female accomplishments and histories. Sitti’s Nye subtly navigates the various meanings of “transfer” Secrets (1994) tells the story of an Arab-American girl to convey, carry and send the subject (and her readers) and her Arab grandmother set in a Palestinian village on their own journeys. Physical objects, as well as like the one in which Nye once lived. Habibi (1997), thoughts, are moved, lost or forgotten and picked Nye’s award-winning first young-adult novel, mirrors up again. Airplanes are boarded, and home addresses her life as an Arab-American teenage girl whose family change along with perspectives. Nye negotiates her inner moves to Palestine, despite the decades-long violence in conflict at living in the comfort and safety of America, Jerusalem between Jews and Arabs. Her poetry collection removed geographically from Arab struggles abroad (as Honeybee won the 2008 Arab American Book Award in in “Burlington, Vermont”). She documents American the Children’s/Young Adult category. experiences: the blank stare of a 99-cent store in “Dallas,” 3 a jumble of misplaced jingoism in “Strange Shirts on the four Pushcart Prizes, a Lavan Award from the Academy of Same Day.” Her grief and wry humor appear throughout American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and the book, such as when she finds her father’s last shopping several honors in children’s literature, including two Jane list (he was an enthusiastic cook who published his own Addams Children’s Book Awards. A regular columnist cookbook of Arab recipes), remembers how her mother for Organica and poetry editor for The Texas Observer, discards his ties, and describes how Aziz’s body finally she has been featured on two PBS poetry specials: “The fails him as his busy brain carries on, lost in the streets of Language of Life with Bill Moyers” and “The United his childhood Jerusalem. States of Poetry” as well as on “NOW with Bill Moyers.” She has been a visiting writer at several schools including Nye has said that when creating books for children or the University of Texas at Austin and the University of adults, “to counteract negative images conveyed by Hawai’i. In January 2010 she was elected a Chancellor of blazing headlines, writers must steadily transmit simple the Academy of American Poets. In 1974, Nye received stories closer to heart and more common to everyday her BA from Trinity University in San Antonio, where she life. Then we will be doing our job.” She has been named still lives with her husband, photographer Michael Nye, a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Witter and their son, Madison. Bynner Fellow of the Library of Congress. She has received Finding a Dialogue The years Naomi Shihab Nye spent shifting from one location to the next gave her, at a very early age, an appreciation for cultural difference.
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